dcc-help is a terminal-based coding help assistant for C programming. When a student hits an error while compiling or running their C program (via dcc, UNSW CSE's Debugging C Compiler), they can run dcc-help to get an AI-generated explanation of what went wrong.

The assistant is pedagogical: it explains the error and guides the student toward understanding it rather than handing over a ready-made fix. The goal is to help students learn to debug their own code.

Model details

Base model: unsloth/gemma-4-31b-it
Fine-tuning: LoRA (PEFT) via Unsloth + TRL (SFT)
Training data: specific course/forum corpus
Task: Explaining C compiler/runtime errors to students

Intended use

Powers the dcc-help assistant for UNSW CSE C-programming courses. Given a student's code and the associated compiler/runtime error, it produces an explanatory, guidance-oriented response that helps the student diagnose the problem themselves.

Limitations

"No direct answer" behavior is currently reliable in single-turn terminal use. In the single-turn dcc-help invocation in the terminal, the model withholds the direct solution and instead guides the student.
Trained on a specific course/forum corpus, so its responses reflect the conventions, content, and any biases of that data and may be out of date relative to current course materials.
Like any LLM, it can produce incorrect or hallucinated explanations; student understanding should not depend solely on its output.

This gemma4 model was trained 2x faster with Unsloth and Huggingface's TRL library.

Project-Carbon/dcc-help-gemma-4-31b

dcc-help-gemma-4-31b

What is dcc-help?

Model details

Intended use

Limitations

Project-Carbon/
dcc-help-gemma-4-31b